It was one of these sunken cost fallacies: I already had the Pentium G2030 with 4GB RAM (2x 2GB) from the old mining project with the RX470. But the Pentium is really slow. I had a newer RGB case, the GPU was there, and the PSU as well - just mainboard and CPU! The Xeon would be my third Xeon computer (after the HP Z600 Workstation and E5-2696 v3 with 128 GB RAM).
Xeon or i5?
For the Socket 1150 it was actually cheaper than a similar i5-4590 (350k vs. 460k VND) for the same 4C/4T and 3.3-3.7 GHz. As I found out, it also has the HD 4600 GPU integrated! A little unusual for a Xeon, but here we are!
RAM upgrade to 10 GB
For just 200k you get a 8GB DDR3 1600 memory DIMM. And then it is useable with Windows 10. Two years later the price has increased to 490k, that’s early 2026!
CPU price history
The Xeon E3-1226 v3 used to be more expensive: 213 USD while the i5-4590 was just 192 USD. 10 years later the service updates have ended in 2021, and it is now 13 USD or 350k VND versus 18 USD or 460k VND.